In my experience, writing a novel tends to create its own structure, its own demands, its own language, its own ending.

why something and not nothing? why music and not noise?

...Because what's the meaning of doing dishes if you're not driven by something beyond necessity.

In a crisis the true facts are whatever other people say they are.

What did it mean, the first time, a thinking creature looked deeply into another's eyes? Did it take a hundred thousand years before this happened or it was the first thing they did, transcendingly, the thing that made them higher, made them modern, the gaze that demonstrates we are lonely in our souls?

Sitting for a picture is morbid business. A portrait doesn't begin to mean anything until the subject is dead. This is the whole point. We're doing this to create a kind of sentimental past for people in decades to come. It's their past, their history we're inventing here. And it's not how I look now that matters. It's how I'll look in twenty-five years as clothing and faces change, as photographs change. The deeper I pass into death, the more powerful my picture becomes. Isn't this why picture-taking is so ceremonial? It's like a wake. And I'm the actor made up for the laying-out.

Everything that goes on in your whole life is a result of molecules rushing around somewhere in your brain.